Smart IoT for Smart Cities Implementation: Applications in Nutshell

Introduction

With the development of technology, devices that connect to internet are increasing in an exponential manner. These devices in particular smart phones are having various built-in sensors that acquire data on a timely basis. Data acquired is processed within the system and results are provided to the user based on the apps that are being designed, developed, deployed based on the users need and intention. But, such data processing may cause overhead to the existing processor wherein the system may hang or may shutdown if all the apps continue to process the data at a time. Hence, there is a requirement for the development of new technique for processing of such data. In this juncture, sensor hub[Benini, L. (2013)] has been introduced in the recent past for the processing of the data acquired from various sensors. Sensor hub is a unit which combines data from different sensors and processes them such that the overhead on the main unit reduces. Hence, there is a rapid transformation from the devices which are manually controlled to the control using Internet based applications revealing the fact of the newly developed technology IoT. This has found its footprints in the various fields like education, travel, industries, health, business etc[Kishore Kumar Reddy N. G. and Rajeshwari K.(2017)]. To build applications which are designed for testaments have an architecture which creates a framework for the entire process. Figure 1 shows the basic architecture of the IoT.

Figure 1.

Architecture of IoT

Users communicate via the sensors which acquire the data required for the user. These sensors are installed in the devices which are designed for a particular purpose. The acquired data may be processed and will be stored on the cloud for further processing. The users further acquire the data that is stored on the cloud which is used for further analysis. As an example, if an automobile is newly designed by a company. The company installs it and will make it drove from one end to the other end of a place which may be of thousands of kilometers distance apart. While the vehicle is on move, the company will be assessing the performance of the designed machine by plotting the data which is acquired on the fly. Every instant the parameters will be acquired by the inbuilt sensors which is also a part of the design. As the vehicle completes a roundtrip the entire design data will be available to the company which makes the engineer to apply some corrections to the design enabling the users who buy the vehicle to have a less problems. The acquired data will show the stochastic nature of the vehicle at various places and under several conditions. Hence, the constraint need to be considered here is that the vehicle must travel in different road, climatic conditions and under different voltage levels of battery as well as fuel. Then, such data will be useful the company to have a worst case assessment, as the user’s drive is also unpredictable.

Sensors may be broadly classified as industrial and domestic application sensors. Sensor is basically a device that can detect any change in the measurand whether it may be of electrical quantity viz., voltage, current etc., physical quantity viz., pressure, velocity, distance etc., thus providing an acknowledgment for the change in the measurand in terms of the same or may be of other type if so converted. Practically, industrial applications require to have better precision and accuracy over the domestic application sensors. Generally, domestic application sensors are designed in such a way that they are less reliable when compared to the industrial sensors which provide high accurate recordings/measurements. It is not always true that domestic application sensors are not reliable. With the inclusion of sensors onboard of every mobile the gap between these two have been reduced. Industrial sensors have high temperature capability so that their operating temperature range from -40 to 85 degrees, having 12 to 16-bit resolution, withstanding against high level of dusty environmental conditions. The latest industrial sensors are having contact less operation as one of the feature making them to have long life over the contact based operation, thus providing remote acquisition. In contrast to these domestic application sensors can be maintained at a less operating temperature and can also be maintained in non-hostile environment.